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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has awarded its Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Taurinus X200 laptop sold by Libiquity.
This is the first product of Libiquity to achieve RYF certification. The Taurinus X200 has the same architecture and certified software as the Libreboot X200, which was certified in January 2015. The Taurinus X200 can be purchased from Libiquity at https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200.
The Taurinus X200 is a refurbished and updated laptop based on the Lenovo ThinkPad X200, with all of the original low-level firmware and operating system software replaced. It runs the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system and the free software boot system, Libreboot. Perhaps most importantly, all of Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware and software has been removed from this laptop.
The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The Taurinus X200 comes with the fast and secure Libreboot firmware and the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system. Importantly, Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware with its applications like AMT (remote out-of-band management/backdoor system, part of "vPro") and PAVP (audio/video DRM) have been removed from this laptop.
The laptop ships within the USA and may be purchased from the Libiquity Store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @01:49PM
A restored classic car is worth whatever the cost of parts + labor is.
A better example: take one of those $75 ebay X200's, replace the palmrest/keyboard plastics with new ones, replace the heatsink with a new one (since the original fans were prone to dying) and then use Middleton's BIOS or something similar to get rid of the BIOS whitelist so you can put in a newer Atheros wifi card. You're now at $250, plus time for labor. That was closer to $500 in the summer of 2013 when I did exactly that.
Continuing the car example: Only the unscathed (undriven) low-mileage matching numbers cars are worth several times their original value. And even then, a horrible investment compared to putting that same money in an index fund and letting it sit all those years.
Libre laptops don't have economies of scale to drive the costs down. They provide total ownership of the software stack, which is a value to some people. The rest of us can block TCP port 16992 at the external firewall (hopefully not powered by an Intel chip) to keep the Intel Management Engine from talking to whomever it talks to.